Eight hours daily labor is enough for any human being
This is one of the earliest calls for the 8 hour work day.
Egypt was tough without our parents. My brothers and sisters had to work day by day, and every time they collected a pay cheque, they brought it into the house and put it on the table. That's how we lived.
That's what building a body of work is all about. It's about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up over time, over a lifetime to a lasting legacy. It's about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star, because the one thing I know about a body of work is that it's never finished. It's cumulative. It deepens and expands with each day you give your best. You may have setbacks and you may have failures, but you're not done.
People are still willing to do an honest day's work. The trouble is they want a week's pay for it.
I never had a childhood. I started working when I was 7 years old. I got $1 a day getting water for the workers at the sugar cane plant.
Those who get their living by their daily labor . . . have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants which it is a prudence to relieve, but folly to cure.
I take back everything I ever said about that boy being clever." He turned around to face the bar while leveling an accusatory finger at the closed door. "That," he said firmly to the room in general, "is what comes of working with iron every day.
An ordinary man will work every day for a year at shoveling dirt to support his body, or a family of bodies; but he is an extraordinary man who will work a whole day in a year for the support of his soul. Even the priests, men of God, so called, for the most part confess that they work for the support of the body.
The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.
Reform would be difficult, for Indian warriors thought death less irksome than daily labor; and men who did not fear death were not easily driven to toil.
What is the good of life if its chief element, and that which must always be its chief element, is odious? No, the only true economy is to arrange so that your daily labor shall be itself a joy.
Bless, O Lord of the centuries and the millennia, the daily work by which men and women provide bread for themselves and their loved ones. We also offer to your fatherly hands the toil and sacrifices associated with work, in union with your Son Jesus Christ, who redeemed human work from the yoke of sin and restored it to its original dignity.
There are in France some fifty thousand young men of good birth and fairly well off who are encouraged to live a life of complete idleness. They must either cease to exist or must come to see that there can be no happiness, no health even, without regular daily labor of some sort... The need of work is in me.